Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH), such as that described in Part 1: Media presentation description and segment formats (ISO/IEC 23009-1, Second edition, 2014-05-15), the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety herein, relates to employing Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to facilitate transferring media content components from a server to a client. DASH specifies Extensible Markup Language (XML) and binary formats that enable delivery of media content from HTTP servers to HTTP clients and enable caching of content by HTTP caches, such as in accordance with messaging and other processes described in Internet engineering task force (IETF) request for comment (RFC) 2616, the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety herein. DASH, as noted in the above identified specification, is intended to support a media-streaming model for delivery of media content components whereby clients may request data using the HTTP protocol from web servers, including those lacking DASH-specific capabilities.
While the present invention is not necessarily limited to DASH, DASH is representative of one distribution model susceptible to polling latency and/or network response latency. The polling latency is particularly evidenced when clients poll servers to check for new media segments, components and other information on a regular basis. The frequent polling can be problematic as the corresponding messaging and related processes can introduce latency when too infrequent and network overload when too frequent. The latency difficulties can be particularly problematic when media presentation descriptors (MPDs) utilized with DASH are dynamic, which is commonly the case for live television or other live content streaming, as dynamic MPDs require a client to poll the server until a new MPD is found, request newly available segments thereafter and then commence or continue playback thereafter once one or more of the segments have been sufficiently downloaded.